The rapid increase in the number of network-enabled devices and sensors deployed in physical environments is changing communication networks. It is predicted that within the next decade billions of devices will generate a myriad of real world data for many applications and services by service providers in a variety of areas such as smart grids, smart homes, e-health, automotive, transport, logistics, and environmental monitoring. The related technologies and solutions that enable integration of real world data and services into the current information networking technologies are often described under the umbrella terms of the Internet of things (IoT) or machine-to-machine (M2M) communications. Because of the large amount of data created by devices there is a need for an efficient way to identify and query this data.
FIG. 1 illustrates an example patient monitoring application that may be provided by a patient's hospital or rehabilitation center using compact biomedical wireless sensor motes that use an actuator as an aggregation point. The actuator transmits data to the network. These small wearable resource constrained devices are examples of M2M devices that may be deployed on a patient to continuously monitor vital signs such as blood pressure and flow, core temperature, oxygen saturation, motion, heart rate, hearing, and vision, among other things. Various kinds of M2M data collected by the M2M devices may be used by the patient's doctor, personal trainer (e.g. from 24 hour fitness), and/or an ambulance service, as depicted in FIG. 1. In order to enable the doctor, personal trainer, and the ambulance service to use the data generated from those M2M device, the semantics of those resources need to be available too. The semantics provide a descriptive definition of the data such that the format and structure of the data can be understood (i.e., the semantics provide meaning for the data).
However, current M2M systems such as the ETSI M2M Architecture described in Draft ETSI TS 102 690 and TS 102 921, do not define mechanisms to support semantics (e.g., data stored within ETSI M2M defined container resources do not have any semantic information that can be stored along with it). As a result, devices and applications need to agree beforehand on a common definition of the exchanged containers as well as on the contained data. This makes re-use of M2M data across different applications difficult in current M2M systems.